The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where independent culture fans who like talking about things like creative economies, media theory, current events, and the future of entertainment and journalism can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out content that is derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop? According to Andrew deWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it’s private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included. That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has been embedded within the media text.”Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhosp